MANDATORY BENCHMARKING LAW BILL MOVES FORWARD

Sometimes end of session amendments are actually a good thing!

AB 802 (Williams; D-Santa Barbara) a bill relating to below code energy efficiency grant programs, that we have strongly supported was amended to include a re-write of the Mandatory Benchmarking Law (commonly referred to as the AB 1103 program). As many of you know the benchmarking law as written over six years ago is can be cumbersome and expensive to undertake, especially in multi-tenant buildings where access to utility information may not be available to the building owner. The current program also uses the real estate transaction (sale/lease/finance) as the trigger for benchmarking, which causes lots of unanticipated problems and headaches for our industry, and is ultimately not a good trigger because some building may transact multiple times in a year while other may not transact for years at a time.

Under the new language, benchmarking would still be mandatory in California, however, the statute would be rewritten in a way that removes the statutory time-of-sale/lease triggers, sets a lower limit of 50K S.F. for buildings included in the mandate, and would give the Energy Commission more flexibility to come up with regulations across the different building types that make sense. This bill will also make it easier for you to work with your tenant and local utility to get the information needed in a timely manner.